Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid Anime Film Review

Before Ariel and before Lara, Marina swam the seven seas. Director Tomoharu Katsumata's 1975 film The Little Mermaid predates most other filmic iterations of Hans Christian Andersen's 1837 literary fairy tale, with Shirley Temple's Storybook airing an adaptation in 1961. A Russian film followed in 1976, an episode of the American television show Faerie Tale Theatre did a version in 1987, and then, of course, 1989 brought Disney's feature film version, which generally remains the best-known iteration to this day. But what's striking about this spread of adaptations is that only two hew closely to the original story - Faerie Tale Theatre's and Katsumata's.

This is, of course, most obvious in the story's ending. Andersen's tale famously has what modern viewers would call a sad ending – the unnamed mermaid dies, at least physically. (Scholars note that her designation in the story, the little mermaid, indicates that she will not live to grow up.) Marina and Pearl from Fairy Tale Theatre both find that they are unable to kill the prince, which is the only way to avoid turning into seafoam. The message is meant to be one of selflessness: Marina loves the prince too much to buy her own life at the cost of his. As a reward for this, she becomes a spirit of the air after death, able to live on in another form. Andersen gives this a very religious tone, but writers Ikuko Oyabu and Mieko Osanai eschew that to create a more universally hopeful ending.

But this is, perhaps, getting ahead of myself, though it is true that what tends to separate retellings of this particular tale are the endings. The film is more than just its final moments, and while it is very firmly rooted in the mid-1970s – the collar on the prince's shirt practically screams it – it's also still easily enjoyable today. In part, that's because it so clearly influenced what came after it, specifically Disney's version. We can see that in the eels that the sea witch keeps and in Marina's friendship with another sea creature, in this case Fritz the dolphin. (In an interesting case of cross-influences, this version adds in a mean cat, who seems to owe at least a little to Disney's Lucifer in Cinderella.)

The story opens with Marina and Fritz frolicking underwater. There's a wonderful carefree air to their explorations, and it's made clear that Marina is a young teen, full of curiosity and joy. She's also obviously a bit rebellious and resentful that she's the only one of her sisters who hasn't received her pearl hairpin, the mark of adulthood. This feeling drives her early actions, from hitching a ride inside a whale's mouth to reach the surface to impulsively saving the prince when his ship goes down. It also lends an extra layer of tragedy to the story, because we know that Marina isn't mature enough to make the sort of life-changing decisions that she does. That her grandmother has to persuade the king to even give Marina her pearl hairpin also speaks volumes: Marina hadn't been deemed mature enough for her coming-of-age ceremony on her own.

All of this gives the romance plot more of a Romeo and Juliet tone than Andersen perhaps intended. Marina's willingness to sacrifice herself for her love reads as immaturity rather than true love, at least to older viewers (or cynical ones; I've never thought dying for love was all that romantic), and the prince is very much not in love with her. Just before everything goes wrong, he says to her, “Since I can't find her [the woman I love], I want to marry you.” Hardly one of literature's most romantic proposals, but to Marina it means hope and the fulfillment of her dreams, regardless of whether or not he shares them. It may be her crushed hopes and dreams that cause her to reject the knife her sisters bring her, although to be fair, asking a fifteen-year-old to commit murder is hardly likely to go well…and if it does, you've got a different problem.

No matter how you feel about the story, though, as a piece of anime history, this is more than worthwhile. Sadly, I didn't have access to the Blu-ray version, and the DVD is out of print as of this writing. The streaming versions are only available with the English dub, which…isn't great. (I've heard worse, though; it's perhaps just very much of its time.) A bigger issue is that the video quality is fairly poor – the picture wavers and green lines shoot down the screen at times. That makes it harder to appreciate the beautiful, lanky (and topless) mermaid designs and the careful play of light during underwater scenes. But the sea witch's manta ray-inspired design is amazing no matter how poor the image quality, and Marina's body language when she's voiceless still comes through nicely.

The 1975 anime film version of Andersen's tale is often considered the most faithful. While I'd argue that Faerie Tale Theatre is just as close, that version has all the cheesiness of 1980s family television, while The Little Mermaid tries very hard to tell an 1837 story in 1975, not for 1975. It's not a happy story, but if you want to see how we got to Goodbye, Lara in 2026, this is an important part of the journey – and a good film on its own merits.